Point of Contact

by Tom Clancy

  Jack winced again. “Can you at least cut me loose?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you better hurry. These assholes probably have friends, and they might be on their way over. We should get out of here.”

  “Maybe I’ll leave and you can stay here and explain what you did to their friends.”

  “At least one of us would survive.”

  That caught Paul by surprise. “What did Rhodes tell you?”

  “That he was worried about you, that he asked you to do him a favor, that if you didn’t do that favor by midnight tonight, you would be in big trouble. That about cover it?”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. He said he couldn’t ‘read’ me into the rest of it.”

  “So you’re not working with him, or for him?”

  “Yes, of course I am, just like you, doing the Dalfan audit.”

  Paul snorted, pointing his gun at the two dead men. “You’re no auditor.”

  “Technically, you’re right. I’m a financial analyst.”

  “I never knew anybody in accounts receivable that could take out a couple of operators bare-handed. What are you, CIA?”

  Jack shook his head. “No.” Jack winced again. “C’mon, Paul, my arms are killing me.”

  “Just a second. If you’re not CIA, what are you? FBI? DIA?”

  “None of the above.”

  “Foreign service? Interpol?”

  “Look, you’re smart enough to know that if I’m with a sworn service I can’t tell you. But Gerry will vouch for me.”

  “Gerry was working with Rhodes. I don’t know if I can trust him.”

  “Gerry’s good people. You know that. If Rhodes is pulling a scam, Gerry’s not part of it.” He looked into Paul’s pale gray eyes. “And neither am I. If I was, my dad would kick my ass.”

  Paul chuckled. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

  Paul crossed over to the kitchen and pulled a knife out of the drawer. He cut Jack’s bonds.

  Jack sat up, rubbing his wrists. “Thanks.”

  “How’s your head?”

  “I’m gonna need a new one when we get back home.” Jack touched it. Blood on his fingers. He stood up stiffly.

  Paul’s voice softened to a whisper. “I’m really sorry about that. It’s just that I thought for sure you were coming to kill me.”

  Jack went to the kitchen, looking for a clean towel. “Because of that USB drive? What’s on it? And what’s the story on Rhodes?” He found one and pressed it against his scalp.

  Paul sat back on the couch, the gun limp in his hand. “Last Monday when we got hooked into this thing and Gerry took you outside, Rhodes took me aside and said he was working with Langley, and that he had a special mission for me to carry out—loading his USB drive onto the Dalfan mainframe. But you saw how secure Dalfan was. It took me a few days to figure out a way to get around it, and I did. In fact, I was just about going to load it tonight when I decided to take a look at the code. I didn’t like what I found.”

  “Which was?”

  “Rhodes said it was just a piece of sniffing software that the CIA had written. He said they wanted to be sure that the Dalfan systems hadn’t been compromised by Chinese malware before the merger with Marin Aerospace happened.”

  “Sounds plausible enough. Don’t take this the wrong way, but why would Rhodes recruit you?”

  Paul frowned. “We have a history. From way back.”

  “And he called in a favor.”

  “More like he stroked my ego, made me feel important again.”

  “Sounds like the Weston Rhodes I know.”

  Jack checked the towel. The bleeding had stopped. “Let’s keep talking, but we should get out of here.” They took two minutes to wipe off fingerprints and hide any other evidence of their presence before running for the Audi. Paul kept his gun and gave Jack the other one. They fell into the coupe soaking wet and sped away.

  —

  As Jack turned the first corner, Paul asked, “Should we call the American embassy?” He practically shouted over the pounding rain.

  “And tell them what? You’re involved in corporate espionage and I just killed two foreign nationals? They’d hand us over to the Singapore authorities as fast as they could. Besides, the storm has knocked out all the cell service.”

  “Oh, crap!”

  “What?”

  “My laptop. I left it back at the house. I need to get it.”

  “Why?”

  “I copied Rhodes’s software onto the hard drive. Not a good idea to leave that lying around. I’ve also got a lot of important work on there I wouldn’t want to lose.”

  Jack smiled at the idea. “It’s the last place they’d think we’d go.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right.”

  Jack made another turn, heading for the PIE. Traffic had cleared up considerably, but the rain was even heavier than before. The streets were flooding now. Jack couldn’t go full speed even if he wanted to.

  “So finish your story. You said you didn’t like what you found on Rhodes’s drive.”

  “I took a look at the code. I’m no expert, but I’ve read extensively on the subject of cybersecurity—kind of a hobby. I recognized a few lines. I don’t know why they seemed familiar, but they did, so I Googled them when I got back to the guesthouse. I nearly wet myself when I discovered that it was a Stuxnet variant. Super-nasty stuff—the software that took down the Iranian centrifuges, remember?”

  “Yeah. Why would the CIA want to load something like that into the Dalfan system?”

  “I dug a little further into the software. Dalfan wasn’t the target. It was pointed at the Hong Kong stock market.”

  “Hong Kong,” Jack reflected as he pulled onto the Paya Lebar Flyover, heading for the PIE. The few cars that were on the road now were flashing their emergency lights. A wailing ambulance screamed past them in the opposite direction.

  The trees on either side of the freeway were bent over by the fierce winds. Leaves flew like ash through the air, and branches skittered across the pavement. Jack fought the wheel to keep the car in line. A huge gust of wind buffeted the car, rocking it side to side.

  “Wow! That was huge!” Paul said. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Dalfan’s security is air-gapped, remember? They don’t do Wi-Fi. But they’re a registered stock on the Hong Kong exchange, so they’re hardwired to the exchange’s computers via fiber-optic cable. I think the program was designed to do to the Hong Kong exchange what Stuxnet did to those Iranian centrifuges.”

  “Why would the CIA want to crash the Hong Kong stock market?”

  “They wouldn’t. If the Hong Kong market crashes, then so does Shanghai’s, then Tokyo’s, then all of the markets in Europe, and the U.S. crashes right behind them. It would be a global economic catastrophe.”

  Jack whistled. “Doesn’t sound like Langley, does it?”

  “That’s why I ran. Whoever wrote that software was a genius.”

  “No, whoever ordered it written is the brainiac we’re after.” Jack glanced in his rearview mirror. No one following. He asked, “Why were you hiding in a whorehouse?”

  “I told the taxi driver to take me to a cheap hotel. He thought I wanted to get lucky, I guess.”

  Jack grinned. “Holing up with a boom-boom girl until the shitstorm passes isn’t the worst idea in the world.”

  Paul shot Jack an incredulous look. “I just wanted a place to hide until after midnight. Rhodes said that if I didn’t get this thing installed by then, the software would self-destruct.”

  “Like Mission: Impossible?”

  “Nothing that dramatic. A timer inside the program deletes a few lines of code and disables it.”

  “Why didn’t you just destroy it?”

  “It’s evidence against Rho
des, and it’s biometrically passcoded to my thumbprint. Without me, nobody can open it, not even Gavin. So I had to run, too.”

  “For what it’s worth, your plan makes sense.”

  “And for the record, there wasn’t any boom-boom girl.”

  Jack smiled. Of course not. “We’ll grab your laptop and then we’ll figure the rest of this out together.”

  “Thanks, Jack. I appreciate it. And I’m sorry I got us into this mess.”

  “I don’t blame you. It’s Rhodes I’m going to have a few choice words with.”

  Another gust of wind slammed into the car. For a second, Jack thought they’d been hit by another vehicle.

  “What the hell’s going on with this storm?” Jack punched the radio button.

  “. . . with gusting winds of one hundred and forty kilometers per hour. The storm is still tracking toward Singapore. Singapore authorities have issued an emergency alert, advising all citizens to stay indoors to avoid flying debris and downed power lines. Cell towers are down, affecting most cell service providers.”

  Jack snapped the radio off. “We need to get out of this weather.”

  “After we get my laptop, where do you want to go?”

  “Somewhere where it doesn’t rain.”

  61

  Jack and Paul dashed for the front door of the guesthouse, shielding their faces from the stinging rain and flying debris.

  Once inside, Jack heard the sound of someone in the living room. He signaled for Paul to wait, then pulled the Makarov out of his waistband, holding it temple index.

  He turned the corner, gun forward.

  And found himself staring into the barrel of a SIG P229.

  “What are you doing here?” Jack said.

  “Drop your weapon,” Lian said. Their pistol barrels were inches apart.

  “Drop yours.”

  Tree branches knocked and scraped against the living room windows, rattled by the high winds.

  “Where’s Paul Brown?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said.

  “Jack? You okay?” Paul’s voice whispered behind the wall.

  Lian grinned. She kept her eyes sighted down the barrel at Jack. “Are you okay, Mr. Brown?”

  Paul stepped out from around the corner. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Can I trust Mr. Ryan?”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “But can I trust you?”

  “Me? Of course.”

  Jack saw a flash in her eyes. She was calculating. She lifted her left hand from her pistol and raised the palm, then turned the pistol barrel toward the ceiling, signaling a stand-down.

  Jack lowered his weapon and shoved it back into his waistband. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was worried about the two of you,” Lian said, holstering her weapon. “The storm is surging north. I tried calling both of you, but the cell towers must be down, so I drove over here.” She gestured at the broken furniture. “And found all of this.”

  Jack had seen a silver Range Rover parked across the street but didn’t think anything of it. The Dalfan company vehicles were all black. He turned to Paul. “You never did explain what happened here.”

  Paul shrugged. “When I figured out that I’d been played, I got mad.” He shrugged. “Got drunk. Starting smashing things. Kind of lost my mind.”

  “There goes the rental deposit,” Jack said.

  Paul toed a piece of broken pottery. “Stupid, I know. And then I called a taxi to find a place to hide.”

  “Why did you need to hide?” Lian asked.

  Jack told her about the software on the USB drive and what it was apparently designed to do. She was stunned. He added, “Weston Rhodes is playing a dangerous game.”

  “My laptop,” Paul said. “It’s upstairs.”

  “Grab it,” Jack said.

  Paul headed for the staircase. The wind howled outside, amplified in the shaking tree branches.

  “What dangerous game?” Lian asked.

  “Don’t know all the details, but there were some bad dudes coming after Paul, and they’re tied to Rhodes somehow.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I’d also like to talk to your brother.”

  “He and his girlfriend caught the last flight to Beijing before Changi closed.”

  “Let me guess. A business trip.”

  Lian’s eyes narrowed. “What else would it be?”

  “I’ll deal with him later.”

  The glass in the living room window broke. They both turned to look. A tree branch must have—

  Oh, God.

  Two cylindrical grenades bounced on the floor. Jack and Lian turned and dove for the ground.

  Too late.

  The grenades exploded before their bodies hit the floor.

  62

  Jack rolled onto his back, blinded by the dark. A flash of lightning outside the smashed windows gave him a momentary glimpse of rain pouring into the living room. He sat up with effort, the fog clearing. He glanced over at Lian, still facedown.

  Jack crawled over to her and checked her pulse. Alive. Another flash of lightning showed a trickle of blood coming out of her ear.

  Jack rolled her over gently onto her back. She began to stir, then suddenly startled awake, her eyes wide with terror. She turned and stared at Jack, her face a welter of confusion.

  “Flash-bangs. You’re okay. Just take a second.”

  She blinked, then frowned. Jack knew the headache pounding inside her skull was as bad as his.

  “What happened?” she finally managed, as Jack helped her to her feet.

  “Couple of flash-bangs.”

  “How long were we out?”

  Jack checked his watch. “About fifteen minutes.”

  “Where’s Paul?”

  “Wait here.” Jack ran up the staircase, calling out Paul’s name. He stumbled over a step in the dark but caught himself. Another lightning flash lit the hallway. Black shoe scuffs all along the walls. Jack ran for Paul’s bedroom, still shouting his name. He dashed inside. The room was trashed.

  Paul was gone.

  —

  Lian was in the kitchen, washing her face in the sink, when Jack ran back down. There wasn’t much pressure in the line.

  “He’s not upstairs,” Jack said, as he approached her.

  “Not down here, either.” She dried her face. “Those ‘bad dudes’ you were talking about must have followed you here.”

  “Or you,” Jack said.

  “He must have run away again, or they took him.”

  “I saw signs of a struggle upstairs. Paul put up some kind of a fight.”

  “My question is, why aren’t we dead?” Lian said. “We were out cold. Two bullets in the head and we’re not a problem anymore.”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not complaining.”

  “Where do you think they took him?”

  Jack checked his watch. “It’s eleven twenty-seven. There’s still time.”

  “For what?”

  “We need to get back to Dalfan. They’ve taken Paul there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He grabbed her by the hand. “I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go!”

  —

  They took Lian’s silver Range Rover. It had a better chance in the high water and it had all-wheel drive, too.

  No one was on the streets now, which meant no traffic to slow them down, but Jack had to work the wheel hard to avoid the obstacles in the road—tree branches, garbage cans, sheet metal roofing, and abandoned vehicles. A couple times he had to jump the curb and run on the sidewalk to keep from hitting sparking power lines slithering in the street.

  Jack took a chance on Lian and filled her in on the fight at the warehouse and then at the Pink Lil
y.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” Jack said, taken aback by her nonchalance.

  “It’s not surprising, given the stakes involved. I’m just glad you’re the one who survived.”

  “Six dead bodies will be hard to explain to the police.”

  “I think you’re right about the four Chinese disappearing. They’re probably fish food by now. So really it’s only two you have to worry about.”

  “Gee, that makes me feel better.”

  “At least now I know you’re the one who deleted all of my security files.”

  “No, I swear, it wasn’t me.”

  “Then who?”

  “Still working on that one.”

  “I still can’t believe Rhodes wants to crash the world’s stock markets.”

  “I don’t think he does.”

  “But he gave Paul the software.”

  “Sure, but he didn’t write it. That means someone else wrote it for him. So it’s that coder I want to talk to—and the guy behind the coder. That’s the asswipe who’s behind all of this.”

  Lian powered on the radio. An emergency signal blared on every station and an automated voice repeated: “SEEK HIGH GROUND NOW! STAY IN SHELTER! DO NOT DRIVE! AVOID LOW-LYING AREAS! HIGH-VOLTAGE LINES ARE DOWN! STAY INDOORS!”

  Dead traffic lights swayed in the wind; streetlamps and building lights were all dead now.

  Lian punched the radio off. “Only thirteen minutes to midnight. Drive faster!”

  63

  PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA

  GENERAL ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES DIRECTORATE

  Deputy Ri stood in his cramped basement office, talking into the speakerphone on his desk. “Why hasn’t it happened yet?” His expressionless face was beaded in sweat.

  “The man I recruited failed,” Zvezdev said over the phone. “I’ve taken matters into my own hands.”

  “There’s no point in threatening you. You know what’s at stake for both of us.”

  “There’s still time.”

  Ri checked his watch. “Ten minutes.”

  “An eternity. We only need thirty seconds.”

  “Call me when it’s done.” Ri pushed a button with a trembling finger. Zvezdev was his last hope. The missions in Lisbon and Toronto had already failed.